Bernard Gordon

In 1999 the Hollywood screenwriter Bernard Gordon, who has died of bone cancer aged 88, achieved late fame. He became a leader, alongside the likes of director Abraham Polonsky (obituary October 30 1999) of the "Don't White Wash the Black List" campaign to deny a lifetime achievement Oscar to the film director Elia Kazan (obituary September 30 2003). In 1952 Kazan, testifying before the House UnAmerican Activities Committee (Huac), had named colleagues - and the wife of movie star John Garfield - as members or supporters of the Communist Party of the USA (Cpusa).

In the year that Kazan - and many other Hollywood notables - appeared before Huac, Gordon, a sometime Cpusa member, was busy avoiding a Huac subpoena. What he did not avoid was a place on the Hollywood blacklist, which proscribed actors, producers, directors and, most of all, writers for real or imagined associations with communism.

So Gordon was forced to pursue his screenwriting career under other people's names (which provided the subject of Martin Ritt's 1976 movie, The Front, with Woody Allen's character putting his name on blacklisted Michael Murphy's scripts). Thus was the screenwriter on Hellcats of the Navy (1957), which featured Ronald Reagan and his wife Nancy Davis, credited as Raymond T Marcus, rather than Gordon.

Marcus, who had given his friend Gordon work as the "world's worst plastics salesman", with his Los Angeles business, took the writing honours on seven of his erstwhile employee's 1950s films. These included the splendidly titled Zombies of Mora Tau and Chicago Confidential (both made in 1957). From 1962 to 1965 it was his film producer friend, the Paris-based Philip Yordan (obituary, April 9 2003) who was credited on movies like the British-made The Day of the Triffids (1962), and Circus World (1964). Yordan indeed provided a name for several other writers who had faced the witch-hunt.

Gordon, a shortish, somewhat crusty man, was emotionally scarred by an experience that had forced a talented, hugely promising writer into plastics and then into private investigation. "I got pretty good at that - following up accidents and that sort of thing," he told me.

He was born into a middle-class Jewish-Russian family in New Britain, Connecticut, during the 1918 flu pandemic - he later said that his mother told him that she gave birth surrounded by coffins prepared for its victims. He grew up in New York City, but was excluded from Columbia University because of its Jewish quota system. So he graduated in 1937 from what he called the "Harvard for poor guys", City College, where he spent too much time running the film society and making amateur pictures for academic achievement.

The early years of the depression made its mark. He saw his energetically entrepreneurial father, who ran a small hardware shop, turn into "an anxious depressed man who worried each month how to pay the rent ... and the doctor's bills for my chronically ill mother". That fed into a process which led him to join the Communist party in 1940. "Viewed from the perspective of that time," he wrote, "the question for me then was not why join the party, but can a principled, self-respecting person refuse?"

Medically unfit for military service Gordon headed west, arriving in Los Angeles with $16. He spent the war at Paramount picking out ideas for films from the studio's story library. He also joined the Screenwriters Guild, took part in strikes and was fired in December 1947, seven years after beginning work there.

It was then that he began his screenwriting career, working with his wife, Jean Lewin, and they got $200 a week each in the Columbia B-picture unit. His wife, who had run a wartime club for US service personnel, the Hollywood Canteen, shared Gordon's political convictions. The couple worked on several drafts of a crime story screenplay, and studio executives said they liked the script - then promptly fired them. The film was never made; the same happened at Warner Bros.

Gordon's first credit for a completed movie was on Flesh and Fury (1952), with Tony Curtis and Jan Sterling. Then came The Lawless Breed (1953) with Rock Hudson, and Crime Wave with Sterling Hayden - an actor who testified before Huac and later apologised - and Gene Nelson. Crime Wave was released in 1954, but completed in 1952.

It was in 1952 that the Huac subpoena had arrived. So when William Castle's The Law Versus Billy the Kid was released in 1954 the screenwriting was credited to one John T Williams. In this instance Gordon used not just Williams's name, but also his social security number, which meant that the poor man was landed with a heavy income tax bill. By the time of Earth vs. the Flying Saucers (1956), Raymond T Marcus had taken over the role as Gordon's front man.

For a while, Gordon went into exile in Europe, particularly in France and Spain. In 1963 he scripted, as Yordan, Fifty-Five Days in Peking but this had followed the triumph of Dalton Trumbo, another blacklisted writer. Trumbo was one of the Hollywood Ten, who had been arraigned before Huac in 1947 and imprisoned after refusing to name names of others with "red" connections. By 1960 Trumbo had been credited on Otto Preminger's epic on the birth of Israel, Exodus, and Stanley Kubrick's multi-Oscar-winning Roman epic Spartacus. As John Kennedy moved towards the White House, so the days of red scares, witch-hunts, the power of Huac - and indeed the Cpusa - and the blacklist was fading.

Yordan was still credited on Battle of the Bulge, which was released in 1965. Gordon's other films as a writer included The Cry of Battle (1963), The Thin Red Line (1964), Custer of the West (1967) and Krakatoa East of Java (1969). His last film writing assignment was to adapt Margaret Atwood's Surfacing for the screen in 1981. He had, it seems, more credits restored to him than any other writer.

As a producer he was responsible for Bad Man's River (1971), Pancho Villa (1972) and Horror Express (1973).

He is survived by his daughter.

· Bernard Gordon, screenwriter, born October 10 1918; died May 11 2007.